Photo of Dying Stars Looks Like Cosmic Jellyfish With Rings

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A NASA spacecraft has snapped a photo of two dying stars
encircled by vast rings, a view that scientists describe as a
cosmic jellyfish floating in a starry sea.

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope took
the eye-catching snapshot, which depicts a pair of dying stars
surrounded by fluorescing gas and two unusual rings, the likes of
which astronomers had never seen before. [ Photo
of the cosmic jellyfish stars ]

"I am reminded of the jellyfish exhibition at the Monterey Bay
Aquarium beautiful things floating in water, except this one is
in space," said Ned Wright, principal investigator of the WISE
mission at UCLA and a co-author of a new study on the discovery.

Space jellyfish or butterfly?

The structure, known as NGC 1514 or the "Crystal Ball Nebula" is
located about 800 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.

NGC 1514 belongs to a class of objects called planetary nebulas.
Nebulas have nothing to do with planets. The term was coined by
Sir William Herschel who discovered NGC 1514 in 1790 to describe
similar objects with circular, planet-like shapes.

Planetary nebulas form when dying stars toss off their outer
layers of gaseous material. Ultraviolet radiation from a central
star or, in NCG 1514's case, a pair of central stars causes this
shed gas to fluoresce with colorful light.

The result is often striking in fact, planetary nebulas have
sometimes been called "the butterflies of space."

Nebulas with asymmetrical, cloudy wings are common. But nothing
like the newfound rings around NGC 1514 had been seen in them
before, researchers said.

These rings are made of dust ejected by the dying pair of stars
at the center of NGC 1514, researchers said.

This burst of dust collided with the walls of a cavity that was
already cleared out by stellar winds, forming the rings.

The research is detailed in a recent issue of the Astronomical
Journal.

Spotting the heat glow

The
WISE telescope was able to spot the rings for the first time
because their dust is being heated and therefore glows with
infrared light, which WISE can detect. In visible-light images,
the rings are hidden from view, drowned out by the brightly
fluorescing clouds of gas.

"This object has been studied for more than 200 years, but WISE
shows us it still has surprises," said study lead author Michael
Ressler of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Infrared light has been color-coded in the new WISE picture so
that the different hues such as blue, turquoise, green and red
represent different wavelengths of light. The dust rings stand
out in a vibrant orange color.

The greenish glow at the center of the image is an inner shell of
material, blown out more recently than an outer shell that is too
faint to be seen in WISE's infrared view. The white dot in the
middle is the central pair of stars, which are too close together
for WISE to see separately.

NGC 1514's structure, though it looks unique, is probably similar
in overall geometry to other hourglass nebulas, Ressler said. The
structure looks different in WISE's view because the rings are
detectable only by their heat.

Launched in December 2009, the WISE telescope has catalogued
hundreds of millions of asteroids, stars and galaxies,
researchers said.

In late September, after
covering the sky about 1 1/2 times, WISE ran out of the
coolant needed to chill its infrared detectors.

The spacecraft is still scanning the heavens with two of its four
detectors, operating under an
extended mission called NEOWISE. NEOWISE focuses primarily on
comets and asteroids, including near-Earth objects bodies whose
orbits pass relatively close to Earth's orbit around the sun.

More oddball finds like NGC 1514's rings are likely to turn up in
the plethora of WISE observations, researchers said.

The first batch of the probe's data will be released to the
astronomical community in spring 2011.